Using the Model

Investigating climate risks

We have designed a coupled Earth system model (ESM) experiment protocol for investigating climate risks at different levels of Global Warming (GWL) and associated with different magnitudes and duration of global warming overshoot (e.g. exceeding 2°C above pre-industrial (PI) values).

The protocol is being used to investigate the risk, mechanisms behind, and subsequent impacts, of abrupt change in the TerraFIRMA focus phenomena; ice sheets, tropical forests and marine ecosystems, and for assessing the reversibility of any triggered abrupt changes. We’ll also use the experiments to assess social and environmental impacts arising from long-term stabilization of global climate at different GWLs, from overshooting key GWL targets, and the potential reversibility of such impacts if the Earth’s climate is cooled back to present-day or PI temperatures, sometime after warming stabilization.

See this article for further details where we outline the experiment protocol (termed the TerraFIRMA Overshoot protocol, or TF-OS), present some initial results from TF-OS using a specific configuration of UKESM1.1 and outline a timetable for making the TF-OS simulation data available to TerraFIRMA scientists and, more broadly, to the UK research community.